Bill Moyers: "Big Media is Ravenous. It Never Gets Enough. Always Wants More. And it Will Stop at Nothing to Get It. These Conglomerates are an Empire, and they are Imperial."

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. “Liberty,” he said, “is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote.”

to paraphrase Bill moyers:

My fellow lambs -- it's good to find you well-armed with passion for democracy,

"I’m doing a documentary to air this spring called Buying the War on this period, leading up to the invasion -- it is absolutely stunning, frightening how the major media organizations were willing, even solicitous, hand puppets of a state propaganda campaign, cheered on by the partisan ideological press to go to war. "

We have reached the stage when the Poo-bahs of punditry have only to declare that “the world is flat,” for everyone to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves. It's called reporting.

I think what's happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence, but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. That documentary I told you about, Buying the War, I can't tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?

So if we need to know what is happening, and big media won't tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and big media won't tell us; if we need to know what to do about it, and big media won't tell us, it's clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves. “This ain't the product of intelligent design. The boss man in the big house has been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system.” This is the moment freedom begins, the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story, and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself

the words of a Marge Piercy poem began to form in my head, and I remembered all over again why I was coming and why you were here:

What can they doto you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can bust you, they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can t walk, can’t remember, they can take your child, wall up your lover. They can do anything you can’t blame themfrom doing. How can you stop them? Alone, you can fight, you can refuse, you can take what revenge you can but they roll over you.

But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob, a snake-dancing file can break a cordon, an army can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four you can play bridge and start an organisation. With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund raising party. A dozen make a demonstration. A hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand, power and your own paper; a hundred thousand, your own media; ten million, your own country. It goes on one at a time, it starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again after they said no, it starts when you say We and know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.